Court Upholds Dismissal Of Major Live Nation Anti-Trust Case

As the biggest bull in the barn, Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary are easy targets; and too often they’ve painted the bulls eye on their own forehead. But Live Nation’s behavior does not violate anti-trust regulations, according to a Circuit Court of Appeals.

Live Nation scored a legal victory on Thursday when the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a dismissal of an anti-trust lawsuit against the company.

The suit, brought against Live Nation by Seth Hurwitz’ It’s My Party, Inc., which operates the famed 9:30 Club in Washington and the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland, alleged that the promoter was violating anti-trust regulations by using its influence to influence artists to appear only at specific venues.

However, the court found that IMP’s suit failed to identify the market that Live Nation was alleged to be monopolizing and the court rejected IMP’s characterization of the touring market.

“By cutting ties among related products and related producers, IMP’s view of economic activity, if allowed to take hold, would box firms both into their own product markets and into their own geographic locales. That tendency toward isolationism has more in common with the market squares and horse-drawn buggies of the nineteenth century than with the interconnected and technology-driven contemporary world,” circuit judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in his decision.